Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit NovelsLawrence R. Broer These essays show the Rabbit novels to be a carefully crafted fabric of changing hues and textures, of social realism and something of grandeur, worthy of Dickens, Thackeray, and Joyce. In the tales of"Rabbit" Angstrom-Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990) John Updike has produced one of the most compelling literary tapestries of our time. Updike's Rabbit, the aging high-school basketball star adrift in the century's confusion, is an archetypal American hero, one strikingly real and individual yet emblematic of his class, his country, and his era. Updike's remarkable achievements in these novels as poet and historian-his ingenious weaving of lyric and epic, of art and four decades of American politics-require that the novels be read on a variety of levels, thus lending themselves to the diverse critical approaches represented in Rabbit Tales. Lawrence R. Broer brings together twelve essays by prominent Updike scholars to illuminate the unique achievement of the four Rabbit novels and demonstrate unequivocally the importance of the Rabbit novels to Updike's canon and to 20th-century American literature as a whole. |
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... calls the " yes , but " quality of his fiction , a subversiveness that resists closure — re- fusing to place the truth in the hands of a Rabbit , an Eccles , a Skeeter , a Jill , a Stavros , or a Mr. Springer . The truth has no fixed ...
... calls " the beauty of belief ” ( Run 366 ) . A soli- tary in the midst of Middle America , Harry would not use such terms as " beauty " and " belief , " but he knows that something , what he calls " it , " is up there . Rabbit's ...
... calls him " fertile and fearful and not easy to catch ... wild and timid , harmful and loving , hardhearted and open to the motions of grace ” ( n.p. ) . Harmful and loving , Updike's hero personifies D. H. Lawrence's famous definition ...
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Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels Lawrence R. Broer No preview available - 2000 |